The Diary of Fiona J McNally

The Scar to Prove It

The house was made of fibro and stood on the edge of a great playing field that was flanked by a bicycle track. The Viscounts had lived there for as long as anyone could remember. All seven of them. If indeed Viscount was their name. You couldn’t be sure.

James Viscount and I were in the same year at school. A shy, studious boy with very dark hair and olive skin, he was quiet, unassuming.

The family were good at keeping to themselves. They weren’t the sort of clan you would run into at the shops or down at the pool. They lived in that house and for all intents and purposes they stayed there. Quietly, unobtrusively.

Next-door to their house was a primary school. The sort of school that bred delinquents. The sort of place where a child could learn the finer points of criminal behaviour. James had been to this school. I often wondered how he would have fitted in with the truants and the back chatters and the neglected. What would they have made of his clean school blazer, his cut lunch, and his wholesomeness? Did his brooding darkness set him apart? Did it cloak him from the apparent harm that would have existed all around him?

In high school James stayed away from his former classmates. Avoided their company. In turn, he wasn’t pestered or harassed. He just was.

It was also the case that there was an Aboriginal settlement on the other side of the Viscount home. You had to pass it to get to their front door if you were coming from the beach. If you approached it from the cycle track end, then you merely saw the Aboriginal flags waving in the breeze or occasionally heard the screams of children in the dunes.

Some of the Aboriginal children attended our high school. They didn’t keep regular hours. They came and went as the mood took them. Some days they would arrive yelling about their right to disregard the school uniform. 'I’m wearing me colours, miss.' They would tell the teacher, or 'I don’t have to be here.' Maybe this was true for all of us. Maybe none of us had to be anywhere that didn’t inspire and motivate us.

In summer, James could have been mistaken for an Aboriginal. His skin was so olive his hair so black that he could meld into the crowd if he chose to. You never knew what James secretly chose. I would see him riding his bike through the lanes of the Aboriginal houses. Fearless. People had been mugged for less. There were no Keep Out signs for James. He ventured in and he came out unscathed.

Who were his friends? The Italians. The boys whose names ended in vowels. The boys who played handball at the back of the school shed every lunchtime and ate salami sandwiches. The boys who all had cousins in other years. This identification with the Latin contingent negated the Viscount surname. Where was the requisite vowel at the end of that name? Should it have read Visconti? Vincenzi? James had no cousins, or none that we knew of. His eldest brother Ray was rumoured to have attended our school years before. If you wanted to you could look him up in a year book I supposed. I had seen him once at a school dance. Waiting by his Commodore to meet James. He too was dark in an obviously ethnic sort of way. He looked like a Sal or a Mario.

James never spoke of his siblings much. James was a closed book. Once a year you might catch a glimpse of his very white smile. A row of shining teeth, perfect for all intents and purposes. What a waste to hide that smile in an olive frown.

Once I had seen James at a fruit market. The vendor was Italian. Short, stocky, fond of waving his hands in the air as if directing traffic. James had stood impassively by while the vendor grew more and more animated and his Italian louder and louder. James must have understood for he nodded in places that seemed to be right. But his answers were in English. Softly spoken English, with a well-modulated voice.

'James is a refugee', said my father. 'Caught between two cultures. He doesn’t know where he fits in. '

Where had he come from? Was he just as much at home sipping tea with families who had surnames like Carruthers and Baldwin? Or did he prefer the vineyards, the pizza parlours, the ristoranti?

Once at a parent teacher night, James’ mother had appeared. She was not clad as we had expected in David Jones finery and sporting a salubrious voice. She was a shock. She wore a headscarf and large gold earrings. Her dress was black, her shoes black sandals. Her English was faltering. I thought I could see the flour stains on her hands and at the corners of her wedding band where she had been rolling dough. A large crucifix swayed between her breasts. She looked suspiciously at the rows of tables, the crowds, the teachers.

When I was sixteen James ran me over. He started his journey peddling up the hill behind me. I walked casually by the roadside. I wore a pink sloppy- jo. It bore my first name. Childish now I think about it. Silly. With uncharacteristic vigour and energy, James and his bike bore down the slope, the wind in his hair, the wheels whirring like a child’s windmill.

I saw the car before he did. I must have for I stepped a little to the side. As I turned , I saw his bike careering toward the headlights, maniacally, with no regard for the danger. Then as if he had had a sudden change of heart, as if it had suddenly dawned on him that a ten speed would not out run a V8, he swerved. The screech of his tyres was like a scream, until my own screams were louder and more insistent. The bike clipped my legs and sent me skimming across the road like a diver. Only there was no water to catch me.

-Your face

His black eyes were inscrutable but I could clearly detect the fear in his voice.

- I think my leg is broken

- But your face is bleeding!

The leg surprised me. I could walk on it. It allowed me to hobble home. My face was of no concern at that stage. I couldn’t see the horror that greeted James. He kept trying to tell me about it as he ran next to me, pointing and gasping.

I wanted him to go away. To retreat, to get lost. I wanted to find a mirror. Survey the damage, reconvene. I wanted to be inside the safety of my house, on the end of a telephone to someone. Anywhere but with this dark haired gypsy loping along beside me.

- You need a hospital

- It’s okay

He reached to touch the alleged wound and I pushed at him. He recoiled.

- Your shirt is ruined

- It’s not a shirt. It’s a sloppy Jo

- It’s all red! You’re bleeding onto your jeans. You may need stitches

- What are you? A doctor?

He was silent then. He stood helplessly at the edge of the cycle track, minus his bike. He watched me run across the street into my house. He stayed there for a long time watching for signs of life. Waiting to hear an ambulance or see a relative arrive.

He was still there when I came home from the hospital two hours later, nursing six stitches and a tea-towel full of ice. How long would he wait in the undergrowth? What was it he wanted to see?

James is a weirdo said the milk bar kids. But then what did they know? Their aspirations lent themselves to heroin trials and break and enter. He never says much they proclaimed. He’s the walking dead. When they grew bored they launched a campaign against him. Not a rock hurling, food throwing endeavour, but a child’s war of psychology. They tried to get a reaction. They burnt themselves out and moved on within two months.
Later that year some vandals burnt down the primary school next to his house. It made the six o’clock news. Bits of Government Issue exercise books, black at the edges, danced across the field and into the Viscount yard. Some child’s scrapbook sat in their hedge. The acrid smell of burning plastic filed the air. I felt it was my duty to pay my respects in some way.

I found him crouching in the ground of the schoolyard. His raven head bowed over something in the grass. There was a deep reverence to his pose. I approached with caution. He was tall when he stood up, but hunched over in the soot he looked vulnerable and shrunken.

When I reached his side I saw his head turn slightly. Had he recognized me by shoes? Or did he know me by my feet? The same feet that had been caught in the spokes of his bike?

- It’s dead. I couldn’t save it.

I saw that he cradled a bird in his arms. A bird that had been nesting in one of the classrooms. A bird that had been too slow to escape.

I was unmoved by the bird. I felt nothing for it. It was the intensity of his voice that startled me, the tears in his eyes. The look of sheer and utter desolation and hopelessness.

- I’m going to take it home. I don’t want to leave it this way.

I have told that story to many. I have recounted the details of James distress, his raw emotion. No one who knew him believed me. No one who had met him could conceive of such a reaction to an unknown bird. They had thought I was embellishing, fabricating more of the gypsy legend.
He was cut off, they all said. Emotionally vacuous, cold.
But this was the second time I’d seen him flinch and anyway, I’ve got the scar to prove it.

posted by Fiona McNally @ 8/25/2004 02:51:00 pm